Pandigital teams with Barnes & Noble for color e-reader

Pandigital's color e-reader is relatively cheap and has support from a major bookseller, but it also demonstrates the danger of choosing a flashy color display over basic E-Ink.

The Pandigital Novel ships this June for $200. It's based on the Android platform and has a 7-inch, 800-by-600 resolution touch screen display, Wi-Fi support and a digital bookstore from Barnes & Noble. Books can be stored to 1 GB of memory or an SD card, and the device supports PDF, EPUB and HTML. A Web browser is on board, and the device plays music and video.

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Now for the bad news: That color screen is a battery fiend, affording just six hours on a charge in reading mode. That means the Pandigital Novel can barely survive a non-stop flight across the United States. By comparison, readers with E-Ink screens last a week or longer on a single charge. The Novel is also heavy, weighing a pound to the Nook's 0.75 pounds and the Kindle's 0.64 pounds. Not that it'd weigh you down, but it could be the difference between comfortable one- and two-handed operation.

Still, the Pandigital novel is helping to forge a new low-budget e-reader market in the United States. Around the same time as the Novel's debut, Kobo will release a $150 e-reader with support for a digital book store from Borders. A race to the bottom on pricing is just what dedicated e-readers need to survive against multi-purpose tablets like Apple's iPad. The problem with Pandigital's reader is that it tries to do too much and sacrifices what's important in the process.

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